Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves, Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, While the still morn went out with sandals gray : He touched the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay: And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropt into the western bay. At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue : To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. THYRSIS. Matthew Arnold. A MONODY, to commemorate the Author's Friend, ARTHUR Hugh ClougH, who died at Florence, 1861. How changed is here each spot man makes or fills! The village street its haunted mansion lacks, And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks- See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays! Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm, The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs, The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames?— Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring, The tender purple spray on copse and briers! Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night!- Now seldom come I, since I came with him. That single elm-tree bright Against the west I miss it! is it gone? We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said, Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here, My pipe is lost, my shepherd's-holiday! Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart It irk'd him to be here, he could not rest. He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep, Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep. He knew, which made him droop, and fill'd his head. So, some tempestuous morn in early June, When garden-walks and all the grassy floor * "There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies."-GLANVIL'S Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661. With blossoms red and white of fallen May, And chestnut-flowers are strewn So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees, Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I! Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And open, jasmine-muffled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, And the full moon, and the white evening-star. He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown! But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see; But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate, Some good survivor with his flute would go, Piping a ditty sad for Bion's fate; And cross the unpermitted ferry's flow, And relax Pluto's brow, And make leap up with joy the beauteous head Are flowers first open'd on Sicilian air, O easy access to the hearer's grace When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine! She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain. Well! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be, In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp'd hill! I know what white, what purple fritillaries Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields, I know these slopes; who knows them if not I?- With thorns once studded, old, white-blossom'd trees, Where thick the cowslips grew, and far descried High tower'd the spikes of purple orchises, |